Argo Blockchain plc

Good afternoon and welcome to the Argo Blockchain PLC Q1 2023 results investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time by the Q&A tab situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it received in the meeting itself. However, the company will review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Tom Devine, Vice President of Investor Relations. Good afternoon, sir.

Thanks, Alessandro. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that today's presentation and remarks may contain forward-looking statements. For our full risk factors, please see our Form 20F filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the year 2022. I'd also like to point out that in our Q1 earnings and going forward, we'll be reporting our financial results in U.S. dollars. With us today for our discussion of Q1 2020-23 results are Saif El-Bakly, Argo's interim chief executive officer, and Jim McCallum, Argo's chief financial officer. And now, I'll turn it over to Saif.

Thanks, Tom. Hi, everyone. Good morning, afternoon. Saif here with my colleague, Jim. Thanks for tuning in today for Q1 2023 results. Just a few weeks ago that we provided you with our 22 year end results and a preview or Q1 23 going forward, we will provide timely quarterly updates, along with these earning calls. Before moving to Q1 I just wanted to remind everyone of our top priorities for the next couple of quarters these priorities include financial discipline and the leveraging which is top of mind. operational excellence, which is optimizing and growing our hash rate, and lastly, growth and strategic partnerships for the sustainable future of this company. We'll touch on these key pillars throughout the presentation as we discuss our results and our current projects. With that, let's look at how Q1 shaped up. As I mentioned on the previous slide, financial discipline remains a priority and one of our key pillars. As part of this, we're laser focused on cash flow generation and preserving cash. At the end of March, we had around $14 million of cash on the balance sheet. In the first quarter, we mined 491 Bitcoin and generated revenue of 11.4 million, which is an increase of 15% over our revenue from Q4 22. Our mining margin percentage came in at 49%, which is a significant increase quarter over quarter, up from 35% in the fourth quarter of 22. And that translated into an average cost per Bitcoin mined of $11,811. Aside from the price of Bitcoin and global hash rate, the other key variable that drives mining margin is our cost of power and hosting. For the first quarter, our average all-in power price and hosting rate came in at lower than $0.05 per kilowatt hour across all our operations. And that was lower than the previous guidance we had given on our year-end call of $0.05 to $0.055 per kilowatt hour. As we'll discuss in more details in later slides, we are extremely focused on reducing non-mining operating expenses. Compared to the quarterly average in the second half of 22, we were able to lower these operating expenses by 70%. And lastly, for the quarter, we generated an adjusted EBITDA of 1.6 million. I also wanted to briefly mention the spike in hash price that we experienced in May. This was due to higher transaction fees spawned by increased interest in ordinals. That was obviously beneficial for us, and you'll see the impact when we release our May operational update later this week. Now I'll let Jim provide some additional comments on the financial results for the quarter. Jim?